Review of Billy Boyle by James Benn (Soho Press, 2006)

A young Irish-American Boston cop, Billy Boyle’s family has a unique strategy to see him serve out the Second World War safely state-side – get him assigned to the staff of his Washington-based Uncle Ike.  However, by the time Billy has gone through basic training his uncle, General Eisenhower, is in London in charge of the Allied forces.  Billy arrives in the city to work as a personal detective for his uncle and is immediately put to work to find a spy in the Norwegian government-in-exile before a planned Allied invasion of the country takes place.  Aware of his shortcomings, but determined to make his mark, Billy travels to Beardsley Hall in Norfolk, accompanied by his acerbic, doubtful boss, a beautiful and ambitious British WREN, and an aristocratic Polish officer who has a gift for languages.  All is not well in the Norwegian government, which is strained by in-fighting, and shortly after his arrival an attempt is made on Billy’s life.  Soon he is investigating murder and putting his fledgling detective skills to the test.

Billy Boyle is the first book in a series of Second World War mysteries featuring the Irish-American cop turned war detective.  The premise behind the series is a good one – knowing that he’s likely to be called up to serve, a family uses it network to find a cop an easy, safe ride through the war, not anticipating that their plan is going to back fire when Uncle Ike is transferred from Washington to London.  Billy’s role is to act as the personal detective for General Eisenhower, solving crimes that might harm the war effort.  Benn’s strategy is to tell the tale as a kind of boy’s adventure for adults, with lots of dare-doing and mystery.  It works quite well, especially since Billy is reasonably self-depreciating, knowing his limitations.  The plot is a little fanciful, as one might expect, and sometimes it’s a little stilted.  And certain bits do not make a lot of sense, for example, a Norwegian living with other Norwegians leaving a suicide note in English.  Moreover, the first person perspective can get a little tiring at times, with an over-use of I, we, us, etc.  But otherwise it’s quite good fun, mixing adventure with pathos.  I’ll no doubt try another in the series at some point.

Review of Sign of the Cross by Anne Emery (ECW Press, 2006)

Tired of working legal aid, Monty Collins transferred to private practice, losing his wife and custody of his two kids in the process.  After a young woman connected to a Catholic youth group is murdered, his boss asks him to look after the interests of a local priest who has become a suspect in the case.  Brennan Burke is a difficult man to represent, especially since he is open with the police but has a habit of concealing information that might prove useful for Monty.  As the case against Burke seems to strengthen, Monty struggles to construct a defence or to determine who might have a vendetta against the priest.  What he does discover though is that Burke has a colourful past and plenty of skeletons in the closet.  Then a second body is discovered that also points towards Burke and a trial is inevitable.  Monty is fairly certain his client is innocent, but he’s not at all convinced that he’ll be able to persuade a jury to share his view.

Sign of the Cross is the first book in the Monty Collins series set in Halifax, Nova Scotia.  Collins is a lawyer who’s been playing in a blues band since his university days and is separated from his sharp-tongued, law professor wife.  In this first outing he’s trying to defend a bullish but charismatic priest who is suspected of committing murder, who is fairly uncooperative and parcels out information only when forced to.  Interestingly, the only character I had difficulty fully believing in was Monty, who seemed a bit lost and a bit pastiche.  His acerbic wife, his kids, and the characters based around the church all seemed more coherent.  This might partially be the artefact of the first person tense, but was more than that I feel; he just felt a little unsubstantial.  The plot is a somewhat hesitant to begin with, but gains shape and direction as it unfolds.  With regards to the mystery, Emery manages to keep a number of suspects in the frame, though the denouement was no great surprise.  At the end I was turning the pages as much to see how the relationships between the characters turned out as the tale, especially Burke and Monty’s wife.  Overall, a fairly run-of-the-mill mystery, lifted by the supporting characters.

Review of Calling Out For You by Karin Fossum (Vintage, 2006; Norwegian 2000)

Gunder Jomann has led a quiet life in the small village of Elvestad in Norway.  Well into middle age he has a steady job at an agricultural machine supplier and a nice house, but no life partner.  After becoming enchanted with India through a book his sister gave to him he decides to fly to Mumbai to explore and to see if he can find a wife.  Shortly after arriving he meets Poona, who works as a waitress in a cafe and shortly before he returns home they marry.  On the day that Poona flies to Norway to meet her new husband, Gunder is prevented from meeting her at the airport.  The next morning her battered body is found in a field, a short distance from his home.  Nobody in the village can believe any of their neighbours capable of such an atrocity and they close ranks, leaving Inspector Konrad Sejer and his team to try and fathom what transpired and who killed the unfortunate Poona.

Whilst ostensibly a police procedural, Calling Out For You has a somewhat different approach to most books in the sub-genre, focusing as much on the local community and how it reacts to a heinous crime in its midst as it does on the investigation.  The result is a narrative strongly focused on exploring various characters and their interactions and the themes of uncertainty, doubt, suspicion and loyalty.  Fossum nicely plays the heartstrings with respect to the doomed relationship between Gunder and Poona, and the tale has a strong emotional register throughout.  Inspector Sejer is a reflexive policeman who steadily goes about his work, trying to build a case with limited evidence and cooperation.  The scenes where he interviews a suspect are particularly nicely done, illustrating the subtleties of his approach.  Overall, an engaging and unsettling read that provides some degree of closure, but leaves the reader with thoughtful questions to ponder.

Review of Behind the Night Bazaar by Angela Savage (Text Publishing, 2006)

Thirty-something Jayne Keeney is an Australian who has somehow drifted into working as a PI in Bangkok.  Mostly she spends her time tracking unfaithful partners, but when one of them attacks her she ends up heading north to Chiang Mai to visit her closest friend, Didier.  He’s a Canadian academic and safe sex advocate who works amongst the gay community, lives with his Thai boyfriend, and shares Jayne’s passion for crime fiction.  Shortly after she arrives Didier is accused of murdering his boyfriend and is then shot whilst ‘trying to escape’ the police.  Grief-stricken Jayne employs her investigative talents to try and determine who the real killer and clear her friend’s name.  Lieutenant Colonel Ratratarn of the Chiang Mai police has a very different script however, and one thing Jayne has learnt living in the country is that it’s never wise to tackle the police unless you’re prepared to risk everything for truth.   

It took me a little bit of time to get into Behind the Night Bazaar, but once I did the pages kept turning.  Jayne Keeney is a little bit lost, somewhat restless, a tad confused about her feelings towards her gay friend, Didier, and occupies a kind of insider-outsider position in her adopted country, able to speak the language fluently and act in culturally appropriate ways but nevertheless a farang (foreigner).  She’s also head strong, resourceful and happy to take risks.  Her counterpart, the corrupt and scheming Lieutenant Colonel Ratratarn has the same latter qualities, making for an interesting battle of wits.  The plot is nicely constructed, with a good build up of tension  and a very nice twist towards the end.  Savage nicely conveys the culture and place, the everyday life and corruption, and the interplay between locals and foreigners.  A tale that gets progressively more engaging as it unfolds and an enjoyable sojourn into a different culture.

Review of The Hour of the Cat by Peter Quinn (Duckworth Overlook, 2006)

June 1938 and Germany seems poised to invade Czechoslovakia, the French and British trying to find a path of appeasement.  In Berlin, Colonel Oster tries to persuade his boss, Admiral Canaris, that a military coup is the only way to deal with Hitler and the Nazis, but the head of Military Intelligence prevaricates, despite the rumour circulating about war and eugenics programmes.  In New York, veteran of the trenches, Fintan Dunne, has left the police to ply his trade as a gumshoe.  He accepts a job to investigate the supposed framing of a Cuban refugee for murder; a case that nobody seems happy he’s pursuing.  The case proves more complex and dangerous than he anticipates, tainted by police corruption, politics, and the long shadow of events in Germany.  But Dunne isn’t a quitter, despite the risks and consequences.

The strength of The Hour of the Cat is its plot, characters, and historical contextualisation and detail.  The story is an expansive, complex but intricately plotted tale that blends a traditional style private investigator tale with national and international politics.  There are numerous interlinked subplots that mix fictional and real-life characters and are contextualised within the historical record of the time, such as the eugenics movement on both sides of the Atlantic, the expressions of Nazism in the US, the neutrality position of many in the US, developments within Germany and plots inside its military, and even weather events.  Along with its elaborate plot are a large cast of characters, each of which is well drawn and accompanied by a back story.  The result is a compelling and fascinating tale.  Where the story is let down a little is in the telling.  The slow pacing, detailed contextualisation, and understated prose produces a rather flat narrative, with a little too much of the telling not moving the story forward, and the complexity of the story might have benefitted from losing one or two subplots.  Nevertheless, The Hour of the Cat is a clever tale that provides an interesting insight into the US life and politics just prior to the Second World War.

Review of Cripple Creek by James Sallis (No Exit Press, 2006)

John Turner, an ex-soldier, ex-Memphis cop, ex-con, and former therapist, has retreated into rural Tennessee where he has been persuaded to work as a deputy sheriff.  His life has found a contented rhythm with his new partner, Val Bjorn, a local legal counsel.  However, that is about to change after Don Lee, the acting sheriff, arrests a man from Memphis for speeding and threatening behaviour.  In the trunk of the car is a nylon sports bag containing 200,000 dollars.  Shortly after, the man is sprung from the police station, Don Lee brutally assaulted and left in coma.  Seeking justice, Turner heads to the city, a place that still haunts him, where he violently confronts the gang responsible, but rather than securing closure he opens up a slow burning feud that threatens his new life.

Cripple Creek is the second book in the John Turner trilogy and although best read in sequence can be read as a standalone.  The three standout qualities of Sallis writing, in general, and which are all evident in this story, are his prose, his characterisation, and his atmospherics.  Sallis is a poet and his storytelling has a wonderful cadence, his style is all tell and no show.  The reader is dropped into Turner’s world of rural America and its inhabitants, its sense of place and social life.  Sallis has a keen eye for the human condition and the ways in which life unfolds.  He paints a picture of Turner as an enigmatic man who cyclically creates moments of contentment that unravel through his own follies; a man reflexive of his own propensity to reinvent and self-destruct almost without effort.  It’s a compelling mix.  On the other hand, the plot seems merely a vehicle for these explorations, and whilst interesting has gaping holes in it, especially with respect to police procedures: Turner is seemingly inured against the legal consequences of his actions and in Cripple Creek manages to kill a couple of people without anyone else batting an eyelid or even filling out a form.  If the plot was as skilfully composed as the rest of the tale, the book would be a knockout.  As it is, it’s somewhat of a flawed diamond.

Review of Restless by William Boyd (Bloomsbury, 2006)

The hot summer of 1976 and Ruth Gilmartin is supposedly working on a history PhD thesis at Oxford University, but is actually spending most of her time teaching English to foreign students and raising her young son, Jochen.  Her mother lives in a cottage in the Cotswolds and has started to show signs of paranoia, watching the woods behind the house with binoculars.  Having built a new life for herself after war, she senses that her past is catching up with her and turns to Ruth for help, revealing her secrets.  Sally Gilmartin is really Eva Delectorskaya, a Russian émigré recruited by English spymaster Lucas Romer in Paris in 1939.  From there she is sent to Scotland for training before taking up a position in a small outfit run by Romer in Belgium that tries to plant disinformation in newspapers around the world aimed at misdirecting or undermining the German war effort.  The legacy of her time as a spy still haunts her and her training is telling her that she has one more mission to perform, one that she needs Ruth’s help to carry out.

Restless is told in chapters that alternate in time between 1976 and the war.  Whilst I found the more recent narrative to be well written and interesting, it is the war time tale that sparkles - Boyd wonderfully evokes Eva’s journey and the politics, intrigue, spy craft and danger of being a spy for a country at war.  Unfortunately the switching thus had the effect of breaking up Eva’s story with more mundane interludes that a love-sick Iran engineer/activist, suspect German guests, and Ruth’s investigation fail to enliven to the same intensity and vividness of the war years.  At one level then, this is a very good read, with engaging prose, strong characterization, and a well constructed plot; at another, it is a little uneven varying between good and outstanding, though Boyd does an excellent job of weaving the two strands together in the final part of the book with a satisfying resolution that has a nice twist.

Review of A Death in Vienna by Frank Tallis (Arrow, 2006)

1902 in Vienna and a beautiful and alluring spiritualist, Charlotte Löwenstein, is found dead in her home.  The room has been locked from the inside and, although shot, there’s no bullet.  Inspector Oskar Rheinhardt is assigned to the case, but he’s quickly floundering given the apparent supernatural nature of the murder.  He turns for help to his friend Dr. Max Liebermann, a follower of Sigmund Freud, who has his own troubles fighting against his superiors who prefer electrotherapy over psychoanalysis.  Between them they start to investigate the spiritualist’s death, focusing on the group that attend her weekly séances, including a stage magician, a locksmith, a wealthy banker and his wife, a seamstress, a Hungarian count fallen on hard times, and a politically ambitious seller of surgical instruments who dates a rich but unattractive heiress.  Slowly they start to piece together what happened that night, with Oskar Rheinhardt playing Watson to Liebermann’s Holmes.  They are aided by the talented scientist, Amelia Lydgate, an English woman in Vienna hoping to study medicine that Liebermann has been treating for hysteria bought on by a traumatic event.  Then a second murder occurs.

There’s lots to like about A Death in Vienna (also published as Mortal Mischief).  The plot is cleverly conceived and well executed, with a couple of substantial subplots that add, rather than detract, from the story.  The locked room element of the story is well realised and Tallis does a good job of keeping various suspects in the frame.  The characterisation is nicely executed with respect to all the principle and secondary characters, with Rheinhardt and Liebermann being nice, complementary foils.  There is also a strong sense of place and attention to historical detail.  The story is very much set in Vienna, with its streets, shops and galleries, and is rooted in its culture, politics and science at the turn the twentieth century.  Despite all these qualities, the storytelling was a little flat and wooden at the start, but it soon livened up to become an engaging and engrossing read.  I’ll be checking out the next book in the series.

Review of The Last Sunrise by Robert Ryan (Headline Review, 2006)

1941 and Lee Crane has arrived in Burma en-route to Southern China, part of Flying Tigers, a volunteer American air force assembled by Colonel Claire Lee Chennault to aid the Chinese fight against the Japanese.  Training in the Burmese jungle he meets Kitten Mahindra, an Anglo-Indian widow and they start a romantic affair.  Then Crane is shipped out over ‘the hump’, the towering Himalayas, to China, the Japanese invade Burma, and Crane loses contact with Kitten.  When the Flying Tigers are absorbed in the United States Army Air Force, Crane falls out with Chennault and transfers from flying a fighter to a cargo plane.  Come 1943, Crane is an old hand at crossing the hump, transporting goods, personnel, mail and gold to fund the Chinese war effort.  On one trip he transports a young SOE agent, Laura McGill, from Calcutta to Southern China.  He’s persuaded into starting a friendship with her by an OSS agent, the forerunner of the CIA, eager to find out what the British are up to in what the Americans consider a United States sphere of influence, but the relationship remains nothing more than platonic.  1948 in Singapore and Crane is still ferrying cargo around South East Asia, Laura is in Berlin, and he still hasn’t found out what happened to Kitten.  Then some old friends turn up wanting him to fly them all back to a shared secret, a secret that heralds danger and reward.  In return they’ll tell him where to find Kitten.   

The Last Sunrise tells the story of Lee Crane’s time in South East Asia between 1941 and 1948.  The narrative shuttles back and forth between 1941, 1943/44 and 1948, with the scenes concerning the latter told in the first person.  Despite the changes in perspective and the splicing of the timeline, this is a straightforward tale of wartime adventure and romance.  It is competently told and is reasonably engaging, and it draws on real historical events, but the story lacks a real edge despite the various action sequences and rivalries between characters.  It all seemed a little formulaic and there were no real surprises.  Crane is reasonably well drawn as the principled but naive officer, accompanied by a colourful set of stock characters (the femme fatale, the scheming spy, the resourceful but straight-laced young operative, the wide-boy co-pilot, etc), but I never really connected with or cared for any of them.  The result was a competent and pleasant read, but one that didn’t sparkle.